This week, Melanie Phillips’ article on the Al-Dura affair, “Faking a Killing”, came out in the July edition of the British Magazine Standpoint. In the article, Phillips argues that the killing was undoubtedly staged, and that the footage does not show the death of young Muhammed.

But we now know that this whole fiesta of violence and incitement was based on a lie. For whatever people think they saw in those 55 -seconds, it was not the death of that boy. He was not killed by Israeli bullets; he was not killed at all. At the end of France 2’s famous footage, he was still alive and unharmed. The whole thing was staged, a fantastic piece of play-acting, an elaborate fabrication designed to blacken Israel’s name, and incite the Arab and Muslim mobs to mass murder.

Phillips calls the incident a blood libel, rooted in the medieval charge thats Jews murder gentile babies. She then goes through the inconsistencies brought up at the trial- the missing footage, the actors playing for the cameras.

Shahaf’s findings are the most damaging:

He observed, from pictures of al-Dura’s autopsy, that the state of the body suggested he had been dead for at least a day; that this boy was older than 12; and that although there were bullet holes in his forehead, there had been no blood on the ground nor on the wall behind him. He also noted, from pictures of the boy’s funeral on the day of the shooting, that shadows indicated this took place around midday. He was told by two doctors at Gaza’s al-Shifa hospital that al-Dura’s lifeless body was brought to them before 1pm. But the incident at Netzarim had not started until 3pm.

After recounting the evidence, which, for those who have followed the case, is old news, Phillips launches her attack on the media that willingly goes along with the Palestinian propaganda efforts, against Israel.

It is the most egregious example of the animosity towards Israel of much of the Western media, which routinely reports Palestinian or Hezbollah propaganda as fact and refuses to correct the record whenever these falsehoods are exposed. One thinks of the Jenin “massacre” that never was, or the evidence revealing that alleged Israeli atrocities during the 2006 Lebanon war were either staged by Hezbollah or significantly embellished. Indeed, the presentation of theatrical fictions as Israeli atrocities has become so widespread that the practice has been dubbed “Pallywood” — a grotesque new genre of terrortainment.

Why do Western journalists go along with such deadly fabrications? The answer lies in a combination of their dislike of Israel, professional self-preservation, and the fafct that they depend on local stringers who are virtually all partisans of the Arab and Islamist cause.

Finally, Phillips turns her pen on Israel itself, and the official response to the issue. With the exception of Danny Seaman, Director of the Government Press Office, Israel’s plan has been to keep silent on the issue in the hope that the story will simply go away. Phillips argues that this has led to Israel’s regular drubbings in the “psy-ops war”.

Israel fails to grasp that it is in a psy-ops war — hence its ineptitude in reacting to the al-Dura claims. Within hours, the Israeli army assumed it must be responsible for the boy’s “death” — and said so without even questioning the commander on the ground. It then set up an investigation, which concluded that its soldiers could not have been responsible. But it left it at that for seven years, despite Shahaf’s discoveries.
Although Seaman said repeatedly during that time that the boy’s “killing” was a fabrication, he was slapped down by Israel’s foreign ministry. It decided that the al-Dura image had taken on a life of its own, and so anything that reminded people of that image would be bad for Israel. It failed to grasp that if left unchallenged, that life of its own would cause the deaths of untold numbers of Israelis and other innocents.

Even after the startling developments in the French appeal court, Israel’s government has said nothing (although it has now quietly let it be known that it agrees with its own spokesman Seaman). Similarly in Britain, at time of writing, no daily newspaper has reported any of this; and around the world, only a handful of papers has done so. So the public is unaware that images that have convinced such a lamentable number of them of Israel’s iniquity are false, and that the iniquity belongs -instead to the Arabs and the Western media.

… keep silent on the issue in the hope that the story will simply go away.

Heh! Phillips should be accustomed to this well ensconced trait, especially among British Jews amongst whom on the odd occasion I witnessed a display of recoiling in horror at the media coverage of some uppity Jewish American protesting publicly.

Even after the startling developments in the French appeal court, Israel’s government has said nothing (although it has now quietly let it be known that it agrees with its own spokesman Seaman).

Well, Avram Burg did nothing at the time he had the political capacity as he had to get his French Citizenship which he then used to vote in the latest presidential election in France.
As for Israel’s foreign ministry; yes it is very foreign. In several countries I have lived in around the world never once did I see anything in the local press rebutting accusations or incorrect stories about Israel, whereas the foreign ministries of other countries were literally shrieking to correct even the most trivial of slurs, or alleged slurs.

RL,
She is right on about the media in general and as I may have stated in some previous comment, I believe that the MSM is malicious and the adjectives of naivety or stupidty applied to their behaviour just PC.
Yes, initially a journalist is ignorant, but that he is incapable of learning and then informing honestly and sincerely doesn’t jibe.
I think that if one were able to go back to just the past century and “view the rushes” we would find that there are many journalists guilty of being accessories to the fact.
It is not just the politicians who are good at disinformation to lead the sheep.
I don’t know how Melanie personally feels about the “Don’t Rock the Boat” syndrome given that she speaks out on on just about anything worthy of her time, but for me it is most irritating to have to contend with this defeatism.

I think the problem is deeper than anti-Semitism or anti-Israelism. Similar patterns of credulity toward claims of persecution and oppression by “the West”, or “whites”, or “America” are endemic. Major media reporting from Iraq has been rife with it.

At a longer remove, consider the work of Australian historian Keith Windschuttle on “Tasmanian genocide”, or the career of Ward Churchill. Windschuttle exposed the universally accepted narrative of white-perpetrated extermination of natives as having no factual basis, for which he was excoriated. Churchill parlayed his pose as an anti-white Indian militant into a whole career, complete with fraudulent scholarly papers.

It is one of the glories of Western, Enlightenment culture that it can criticize itself. But this self-criticism has hypertrophied into a malignant auto-immune syndrome.

Israel is a victim of this because Israel now stands as part of the West.

[…] Phillips in Standpoint: Al-Dura “Blood Libel”, Victory for …he was not killed at all. At the end of France 2’s famous footage, he was still alive and unharmed. The whole thing was staged, a fantastic… […]

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